Japanese Embassy

Three homemade rockets were fired at the U.S. and Japanese embassies Wednesday, and a car bomb went off outside a building housing Canada's mission, but no one was injured, Jakarta's military commander said. Maj. Gen. Sugito said none of the rockets exploded. The bomb destroyed the car in which it was planted and damaged five other vehicles. Intelligence sources said privately that the attacks appeared to be the work of a small extremist group with possible support from Libyans.

Glendale Mayor Dave Weaver said a memorial to "comfort women" -- sex slaves taken by the Japanese Imperial Army in World War II -- is continuing to cause controversy and damaging its relationship with its sister city, Higashiosaka. Weaver, the lone dissenter in a vote to approve the memorial at a public park, wrote a letter to the mayor of the Japanese sister city expressing regret for the vote, the Glendale News-Press reported . Some council members said the letter was improper.

Dozens of Chinese demonstrators rallied outside the Japanese Embassy then marched through rain-slicked streets to the Foreign Ministry on Saturday, belting out the national anthem and hollering nationalistic slogans against "foreigners" and the Japanese to protest the detention of a Chinese fishing crew. A demonstration of any kind is rare in this tightly controlled nation, and Saturday's protest was a deliberately understated affair. The marchers were carefully monitored by rings of police, who moved through the protest with an almost methodical choreography.

Bok Dong Kim was 14 when she was forced to travel to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore and other countries as a sex slave for Japanese soldiers during World War II. Now the petite 88-year-old travels the world on her own, speaking out against the atrocities she suffered to pressure the Japanese government to produce an official document apologizing to the nearly 200,000 so-called “comfort women” taken as sex slaves from Korea,...

The Japanese Embassy in Kuwait gave refuge to 16 American diplomats and their families shortly after Iraq's invasion, then helped them escape from the emirate, Foreign Ministry officials said Thursday. The Foreign Ministry had kept silent about the matter because it feared any publicity might lead to Iraqi reprisals against Japanese citizens held in Kuwait, the officials said.

June 26, 2013 | By Brittany Levine, This post has been corrected. See note below for details.

An 1,100-pound statue honoring hundreds of thousands of women taken as sex slaves by the Japanese Imperial Army decades ago is traveling by boat from South Korea and is just days away from arriving in Glendale. The memorial, like others on the East Coast and in South Korea, has sparked controversy as opponents from Japan have emailed dozens of letters to City Council members in an attempt to block the statue from being placed in Central Park near the Adult Recreation Center. A group of Japanese nationalists deny that soldiers took about 200,000 Korean, Chinese and other women as sex slaves during World War II, but supporters of the memorials say the atrocities are well-documented.

A helicopter crashed in the port city of Tianjin on Friday, killing all 11 people aboard, including a Japanese pilot, the Japanese Embassy said. The helicopter, which belonged to the Japanese company Asahi Koyo, crashed near Tianjin airport, embassy officials said. According to the state-run Civil Aviation Administration of China, the helicopter had two pilots. One was Japanese, but he was not identified, the officials said; the other 10 people aboard were Chinese. The officials said the nature of the flight was not known although they said it was possible that Asahi Koyo is a company involved in marine resource development.

A U.S. hydrogen bomb was crushed by sea pressure when it fell into the Pacific Ocean off Japan 24 years ago, and its nuclear material has dissolved harmlessly on the sea floor, the United States has told Japan. The material poses no environmental hazard, the U.S. Defense Department said in a report given to the Japanese Embassy in Washington on Friday. A copy was given to the news services today after Cabinet members said Japan would check for possible environmental dangers. The Foreign Ministry later formed a team to evaluate the U.S. report and decide whether more studies are needed.

Despite significant opposition, the Glendale City Council has approved a 1,110-pound monument honoring Korean women taken as sex slaves by the Japanese army during World War II . Members of the council received hundreds of emails - many appearing to come from Japan - and listened Tuesday to dozens of speakers who said the so-called comfort women were not indentured servants but ordinary prostitutes. Glendale has become the latest U.S. city to set the scene for a decades-old controversy between some Japanese who deny their army abducted up to 200,000 women from Korea, China and other countries as sex slaves and Koreans who want to raise awareness of the human rights violations.

The United States has told Japan that a hydrogen bomb lost off a U.S. warship near Okinawa 24 years ago has leaked radioactive material but poses no threat to the environment, the Foreign Ministry said Monday. Foreign Minister Sosuke Uno told a parliamentary committee that Japan accepts the U.S. evaluation but that an investigation is necessary to allay public fears. The four-paragraph Defense Department report, sent to the Japanese Embassy in Washington on Friday, grew out of disclosures last week that an H-bomb settled to the Pacific Ocean floor about 70 miles from Okinawa after an A-4E Skyhawk carrying the weapon rolled off the deck of the aircraft carrier Ticonderoga in December, 1965.

Despite significant opposition, the Glendale City Council has approved a 1,110-pound monument honoring Korean women taken as sex slaves by the Japanese army during World War II . Members of the council received hundreds of emails - many appearing to come from Japan - and listened Tuesday to dozens of speakers who said the so-called comfort women were not indentured servants but ordinary prostitutes. Glendale has become the latest U.S. city to set the scene for a decades-old controversy between some Japanese who deny their army abducted up to 200,000 women from Korea, China and other countries as sex slaves and Koreans who want to raise awareness of the human rights violations.

June 26, 2013 | By Brittany Levine, This post has been corrected. See note below for details.

An 1,100-pound statue honoring hundreds of thousands of women taken as sex slaves by the Japanese Imperial Army decades ago is traveling by boat from South Korea and is just days away from arriving in Glendale. The memorial, like others on the East Coast and in South Korea, has sparked controversy as opponents from Japan have emailed dozens of letters to City Council members in an attempt to block the statue from being placed in Central Park near the Adult Recreation Center. A group of Japanese nationalists deny that soldiers took about 200,000 Korean, Chinese and other women as sex slaves during World War II, but supporters of the memorials say the atrocities are well-documented.

WASHINGTON - As Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe arrives for a Friday summit with President Obama, trade will be at the top of the diplomatic agenda along with security concerns, including new threats from North Korea and an escalating territorial dispute over islands near Japan. On almost every major issue, political and economic, China's shadow will hover over the talks. Abe, who took office in December as Japan's seventh prime minister in six years, will almost certainly push for strong U.S. backing in Japan's tense standoff with China over the Senkaku islets in the East China Sea, which the Japanese administer but which are also claimed by the Chinese, who call them Diaoyu.

BEIJING - Newly installed Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was quoted Monday saying that he would revisit a 1995 apology made by his nation's government for suffering caused in World War II. Although other Japanese officials have suggested retracting apologies for wartime horrors, the words coming from Abe himself are bound to inflame anti-Japanese sentiment in China and the Korean peninsula and put the new government off to a bad start with...

BEIJING - The $15,000 that factory worker Li Jianli saved up to buy his white Toyota Corolla turned out to be nowhere near the costliest part of the deal. He nearly paid with his life. Li was out in the central city of Xian on a recent Saturday afternoon looking for an apartment for his soon-to-be-married son when he happened to steer the car into one of the anti-Japanese demonstrations that were rocking China. Then Li made another mistake: He leaped out of the car to plead with the mob not to trash the vehicle, which he'd bought just last year.

September 20, 2012 | By Barbara Demick and Julie Makinen, Los Angeles Times

BEIJING - The last week's anti-Japan demonstrations in China have been a spectacular display of just how easily the ruling Communist Party can harness the power of protest. In the aftermath of nationwide protests, in which mobs trashed Japanese-owned businesses and set fire to Japanese model cars, critics are questioning the degree to which the Chinese government fanned the flames as part of its dispute with Japan over an island chain both nations claim. "It is obvious that this was planned," said Ai Weiwei, the dissident artist, who videotaped some of the protests.

September 20, 2012 | By Barbara Demick and Julie Makinen, Los Angeles Times

BEIJING - The last week's anti-Japan demonstrations in China have been a spectacular display of just how easily the ruling Communist Party can harness the power of protest. In the aftermath of nationwide protests, in which mobs trashed Japanese-owned businesses and set fire to Japanese model cars, critics are questioning the degree to which the Chinese government fanned the flames as part of its dispute with Japan over an island chain both nations claim. "It is obvious that this was planned," said Ai Weiwei, the dissident artist, who videotaped some of the protests.

Japan joined the club of wary world powers this week after the capture by Peruvian guerrillas of hundreds of guests at a birthday party in Lima for Emperor Akihito demonstrated the frightening global ramifications of foreign policy lapses. "Like America, Japan has made enemies without even noticing, and now it must protect itself," said professor Koichi Oizumi, an international relations expert at Japan University. "We must take an 'eye-for-eye, tooth-for-tooth' attitude toward terrorism.

BEIJING - The worst of the anti-Japanese protests that have swept China in recent days may be over. The financial fallout for the world's second- and third-biggest economies may be just beginning. Japanese-owned factories, restaurants, mini-marts and clothing retailers across China closed en masse Tuesday as protests continued in nearly 100 cities, sparked by a dispute over control of uninhabited islands near Taiwan. Automakers Nissan, Honda, Toyota and Mazda suspended operations at some plants, as did Sony.

BEIJING - Anti-Japan rallies spread to dozens more Chinese cities Sunday, as thousands of people demonstrated against the Japanese government's plan to buy several uninhabited islands near Taiwan that China also claims. Protesters marched in front of diplomatic compounds, attacked Japanese businesses and burned Japanese flags. In the southern city of Guangzhou, demonstrators stormed into the first two floors of a complex that houses the Japanese Consulate, breaking windows in a hotel and smashing a vehicle.